pinhedz wrote:one even noted that at two different screenings he saw audience members heckling Streep's Thatcher, as if it was really her. Sound's like she convinced everyone.

Which reviewer, Pinz? I must say I'm unconvinced. I think it much more likely that the hecklers were objecting to Meryl's PRESENTATION of Thatcher- which is a rather different kettle of fish.

Ken Livingstone, who is challenging the incumbent for the office of Mayor of London this year, recently gave an interview in which he opined that Thatcher was 'clinically insane' in her last years as PM. That's about right: the use of the Royal 'We'; the Elizabeth I ruffs, the Poll Tax. It's now emgerged that she actually considered remaining as PM after losing the decisive Tory Party vote of confidence which eventually unseated her. No wonder the satirical TV puppet show Spitting Image took to portraying her as Caligula.

The "after" clip shows a striking example of Thatcher's mad wandering right eye, so acutely observed by cartoonist Steve Bell (who, incidentally, also noted that Blair inherited it. A disease of high office, perhaps?).

The most potent objections to Streep's performance I've heard have all come from women, many of whose lives she made a misery. Thatcher was essentially a man in drag (Spitting Image dressed its Thatcher puppet at one stage in Churchill clobber). Streep's 'feminisation' of Thatcher is inaccurate.

A small point, Pinz, but to call Thatcher "Maggie" is simply to play the game of Murdoch's rabidly Tory tabloids: domesticating the beast. I'm sure she never referred to herself as "Maggie"- and nor did anyone she knew- until Murdoch showed her there were votes in it.

Here's Elvis Costello's take on Thatcher:**************************************************************************************************************Elvis Costello Tramp The Dirt Down

I saw a newspaper picture from the political campaignA woman was kissing a child, who was obviously in painShe spills with compassion, as that young childsFace in her hands she gripsCan you imagine all that greed and avariceComing down on that childs lips

Well I hope I don't die too soonI pray the lord my soul to saveOh I'll be a good boy, Im trying so hard to behaveBecause there's one thing I know, I'd like to liveLong enough to savourThat's when they finally put you in the groundIll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down

When england was the whore of the worldMargeret was her madamAnd the future looked as bright and as clear asThe black tarmacadamWell I hope that she sleeps well at night, isntHaunted by every tiny detailCos when she held that lovely face in her handsAll she thought of was betrayal

And now the cynical ones say that it all ends the same in the long runTry telling that to the desperate father who just squeezed the life from his only sonAnd how it's only voices in your head and dreams you never dreamtTry telling him the subtle difference between justice and contemptTry telling me she isn't angry with this pitiful discontentWhen they flaunt it in your face as you line up for punishmentAnd then expect you to say thank you straighten up, look proud and pleasedBecause youve only got the symptoms, you haven't got the whole diseaseJust like a schoolboy, whose heads like a tin-canFilled up with dreams then poured down the drainTry telling that to the boys on both sides, being blown to bits or beaten and maimedWho takes all the glory and none of the shame

Well I hope you live long now, I pray the lord your soul to keepI think I'll be going before we fold our arms and start to weepI never thought for a moment that human life could be so cheapCos when they finally put you in the groundThey'll stand there laughing and tramp the dirt down

For my part, I'll cheerfully make a pledge to every ATU poster here that when the bitch finally exits the kingdom of whisky, dementia, mockery and contempt to which she's apparently retreated that I'll seek out her grave and piss on it.

This is apposite, I think:*************************************************************************************************************Instead of being disgusted by poverty, we are disgusted by poor people themselves

Empathy has crashed. No more cruel to be kind. We must simply be cruel

Suzanne Moore

The Guardian, Thursday 16 February 2012

The argument that there is enough money to go round is now a fairytale, like winning the lottery. Photograph: Martin Lee/Rex Features

She is there whenever I go the shops. Every time I think she can't get any more skeletal, she manages it. Wild eyes staring in different directions, she must have been pretty once. I try not to look, for she is often aggressive. Sometimes, though, she is in my face and asking me to go into the shop, from which she has been banned, to buy her something. A scratchcard. She feels lucky. "Maybe some food?" I suggest pointlessly, but food is not what she craves. Food is not crack. Or luck. She has already lost every lottery going.

An addict is the author of their own misfortune. Her poverty is self-inflicted. All these hopeless people: where do they all come from? It is, of course, possible never to really see them, as their distress is so distressing. Who needs it? Poverty, we are often told, is not "actual", because people have TVs. This gradual erosion of empathy is the triumph of an economic climate in which everyone, addicted or not, is personally responsible for their own lack of achievement. Poor people are not simply people like us, but with less money: they are an entirely different species. Their poverty is a personal failing. They have let themselves go. This now applies not just to individuals but to entire countries. Look at the Greeks! What were they thinking with their pensions and minimum wage? That they were like us? Out of the flames, they are now told to rise, phoenix–like, by a rich political elite. Perhaps they can grow money on trees?

Meanwhile, in the US, as this week's shocking Panorama showed, people are living in tents or underground in drains. These ugly people, with ulcers, hernias and bad teeth, are the flipside of the American dream. Trees twist through abandoned civic buildings and factories, while the Republican candidates, an ID parade of Grecian 2000 suspects, bang on about tax cuts for the 1% who own a fifth of America's wealth. To see the Grapes of Wrath recast among post-apocalyptic cityscapes is scary. Huge cognitive dissonance is required to cheerlead for the rich while 47 million citizens live in conditions close to those in the developing world.

This contradiction is also one of the few things we in the UK are good at producing. I heard a radio interview recently with a depressed young man with three A-levels (yes, in properly Govian subjects) who had been unemployed for three years. The response of listeners was that he was lazy and should try harder. Samuel Beckett's "fail better" comes to mind. Understanding what three years of unemployment does to a young person does not produce a job, any more than the scratchcard will change a crackhead's life. But pure condemnation is divisive. This fear and loathing of those at the bottom is deeply disturbing.

Three years ago I was on a panel with Vince Cable at The Convention of Modern Liberty, when Cable was still reckoned a seer for predicting the recession. He said then that the financial crisis would mean civil liberties would be trampled on. But what stuck in my mind was a sentence he mumbled about the pre-conditions for fascism arising. Scaremongering? The emotional pre-condition is absolutely this punitive attitude to the weak and poor.

Our disgust at the poor is tempered only by our sentimentality about children. They are innocent. We feel charitable. Not enough, perhaps, as a Save the Children report tells us that one in four children in developing countries are too malnourished to grow properly. Still, malnourishment isn't starvation, just as anyone who has a mobile phone isn't properly hard-up. Difficult to stomach maybe, but isn't all this the fault of the countries they live in?

At what point, though, can we no longer avoid the poor, our own and the global poor? Or, indeed, avoid the concept that frightens the left as much as the right: redistribution, of wealth, resources, labour, working hours. Whither the left? Busy pretending that there is a way round this, a lot of the time.

The idea that ultimately the poor must help themselves as social mobility grinds to a halt is illogical; it is based on a faith for which there is scant evidence. Yet it is the one thing that has genuinely "trickled down" from the wealthy, so that many people without much themselves continue to despise those who are on a lower rung.

The answer to poverty, you see, lies with the poor themselves, be they drain-dwellers, Greeks, disabled people, or unemployed youth. We will give them bailouts, maybe charity, and lectures on becoming more entrepreneurial. The economy of empathy has crashed, and this putsch is insidious and individualised. No more cruel to be kind. We must be simply cruel.

The argument that there is enough to go round is now a fairytale, like winning the lottery. Poverty is not a sign of collective failure but individual immorality. The psychic coup of neo-liberal thinking is just this: instead of being disgusted by poverty, we are disgusted by poor people themselves. This disgust is a growth industry. We lay this moral bankruptcy at the feet of the poor as we tell ourselves we are better than that.

Crikey! Now you're asking. I'm not an economist, so this is way beyond my field of expertise.

I know enough to be aware that previous attempts to create economic utopia have all ended in tyranny. At the same time, something has to be terribly wrong with a system that rewards CEOs with millions for failure, while at the same time half the world lives on the breadline.

pinhedz wrote:In this film, it's her colleagues in her own party that come off the worst. Were they really such whining, vacillating pipsqueaks?

For the most part, the so-called "wets" in Thatcher's first cabinet were old-style 'one nation' MacMillanite conservatives, decent enough people by their own lights and open to compromise. That's why she got rid of them.

Herakles (1962) Game in The Sand (1964) The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz (1966) Last Words (1968) Precautions Against Fanatics (1969) No One Will Play With Me (1976) Les Gaulois (1988)

Documentary feature films

The Flying Doctors of East Africa (1969) Handicapped Future (1971) Land of Silence and Darkness (1971) The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974) How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (1976) Huie's Sermon (1980) God's Angry Man (1980) Ballad of the Little Soldier (1984) The Dark Glow of the Mountains (1984) Wodaabe – Herdsmen of the Sun (1989) Echoes From a Somber Empire (1990) Jag Mandir (1991) Lessons of Darkness (1992) Bells from the Deep (1993) The Transformation of the World into Music (1994) Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices (1995) Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) My Best Fiend (1999) Wings of Hope (2000) Wheel of Time (2003) The White Diamond (2004) Grizzly Man (2005) Encounters at the End of the World (2007) Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) Into the Abyss (2011)